Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [18]
The result is one of the great late flowers of the Baroque, and its biggest surprise comes as the visitor turns to leave. High in the west gallery is one of the most astonishing, beautiful, and magnificently peculiar organs in the world, built by a local cabinetmaker turned organ builder called Joseph Gabler between 1737 and 1750.
It was one of only four organs Gabler completed, and the project was bedeviled with fires, terrible rows about money, and the world’s first known Trojan horse (after the original Trojan horse, that is): at one stage, Gabler silenced the entire organ by shutting off a secret valve that nobody else could possibly find in his terrifying maze of wind trunks and pipework, only restoring breath to the instrument when he got paid.
Not being technically entirely adept, Gabler set himself impossible challenges simply because he didn’t know they were impossible: the organ, though wonderfully sweet-toned, rattled, hissed, and sighed like a living creature, and still does today, even after restoration. At one stage, it was said, Gabler made a pact with the devil: his immortal soul in return for the secret to making a particular stop (the vox humana, or “human voice”) work effectively; his blood, in which he signed the contract, can still be seen on the pipes….
Yet even in this technical and administrative nightmare, one thing Gabler had no trouble over was the cabinetmaking. The organ soars to the ceiling of the church, winding sinuously around the six vast windows in the west wall. Light floods in over the great four-keyboard console, which looks out over the church; to sit at it is like occupying the pi lot’s seat on a steampunk jumbo jet.
The whole thing looks as if it should fill the church not with music but with perfume, perhaps of apple and lime, of oil and honey and slate—the strange, disorienting perfumes of Riesling. And, as if in homage, above the console hang vast bunches of grapes. To a more restrained eye, they strike an oddly Dionysian note—quite literally, as it turns out, because as well as the usual (and unusual) pipes of a normal organ, Gabler’s haunting fantasy boasts a cuckoo, a nightingale, a drum, and a pedal carillon, and the notes of this carillon are played on the grapes themselves, which turn out to be cunningly crafted bells struck with wind-powered hammers.
If Riesling could sing, it would perhaps sing with the voice of Gabler’s masterpiece.
Which microorganisms make and mar wine?
LOUIS PASTEUR, who lived from 1822 to 1895, first proved the truth of the “germ theory,” which proposes that life-forms too small to be seen by the naked eye are responsible for much natural decay and disease. He is most likely remembered by the general public in the phrase pasteurized milk, but it is less well known that he really invented pasteurization for wine; applying it to milk came later. Pasteurization for wine involved holding the liquid, such as the fermented grape must (liquid from pressing the grapes), at just below boiling point for one or two seconds, long enough to kill off the yeasts and stop the fermentation, but not long enough to boil off the alcohol. He was, in fact, the man who first investigated the microbiology of winemaking and wine spoilage, the unsung knowledge vital to successful winemaking. Winemaking itself depends on controlling a natural process of decay that happens to produce alcohol. Wine grapes have yeasts on their surface, which, if the grapes are crushed and left lying around, cause fermentation (bubbling) and the production of alcohol. This hands-off approach is not a recommended way of producing a drinkable beverage, though surely